ggplot2latex

ggplot2latex is an R package designed to efficiently save ggplot2 plots in LaTeX TikZ format. The package provides functions to optimize the resulting .tex files by rounding coordinates, removing duplicated elements, and reducing the file size. This ensures that the LaTeX documents are both lightweight and maintain high-quality visualizations.

Features

• Save ggplot2 plots as LaTeX (TikZ) files.
• Optimize .tex files by rounding coordinates.
• Remove duplicated elements to reduce file size.
• Utilities to handle special characters in LaTeX.

Installation

To install the package, use the following command in R:

# Install from CRAN (if available)
install.packages("ggplot2latex")

# Or install from GitHub
devtools::install_github("RomanKyrychenko/ggplot2latex")

Usage

Here is an example of how to use the save_tex function to save a ggplot2 plot as a LaTeX (TikZ) file:

library(ggplot2)
library(ggplot2latex)

# Create a ggplot2 plot
ggplot_object <- ggplot(mtcars, aes(x = wt, y = mpg)) + geom_point()

# Save the plot as a LaTeX (TikZ) file
save_tex(ggplot_object, "path/to/file.tex")

Why This Saves Memory

A traditional TikZ export with save_tikz() writes the full raw device output. save_tex() uses the same TikZ/vector workflow, then post-processes the generated .tex by:

• rounding floating-point coordinates
• removing duplicated \path[...] commands
• dropping clip and bounding-box instructions that are not needed in the final figure
• simplifying color definitions

That means the visual remains vector-based and LaTeX-native, but the TeX source is smaller and easier for LaTeX to process.

On five representative ggplot2 figures run locally, including a map and a network graph:

Plot	Raw bytes	Optimized bytes	Byte reduction	Raw lines	Optimized lines	Line reduction
Scatter	11,300	7,990	29.3%	269	134	50.2%
Scatter + smooth	10,106	7,929	21.5%	279	193	30.8%
Faceted scatter	20,750	15,014	27.6%	545	301	44.8%
World map	2,116,053	403,827	80.9%	102,620	21,999	78.6%
Network graph	45,299	19,835	56.2%	2,057	1,136	44.8%

Average reduction across these examples:

• 43.1% smaller .tex files
• 49.8% fewer lines of TeX

These statistics describe source size reduction, not raster compression: the figure is still emitted as TikZ, so there is no bitmap quality loss introduced by the package.

License

This package is licensed under the MIT License.